As is often the case, I found something better than SecureCRT – a panel applet for GNOME that gives me a drop-down list of SSH connections. SSHMenu is cool, way too cool.


Above, you can see my list of ssh accounts in all their glory. A connection is just a click away.

When you set up the connections, you can specify the geometry – ie, where on your desktop you want the gnome-terminal window to pop up, as well as a “profile” for the gnome-terminal instance – very handy if you want to have different color schemes for different ssh accounts to be able to distinguish between them better.

What’s even better is, in the “Hostname (etc)” field, you can prepend ssh options to the hostname. The figure below shows my port forwarding setup for IRC at school, since I can’t chat using port 6667 at school.

There’s a Debian/Ubuntu repository for SSHMenu, and of course, nothing stops you from downloading the .deb packages and installing them if you don’t wish to add another repository to you list of repositories. I wonder how long before SSHMenu finds itself into the Ubuntu repositories

Once you get SSHMenu installed, you can add it to your panel by right-clicking on your GNOME panel, and selecting “Add to Panel”. SSHMenu should be listed as “SSH Menu Applet” under the “Utilities” section. Then all you have to do is use the tool to add accounts that pops-up when you install the applet, or add the accounts later by clicking on the “SSH” in your panel. However, this still doesn’t take us to “one-click” login, since you will be prompted for your password by the server you are trying to connect to.

To make the connections truly one-click (or two-click), you might want to setup password-less logins using ssh-keygen and ssh-copy-id. A quick overview of that process follows:
On your local computer, type:
$ssh-keygen -t rsa
When prompted for a password, you may want to enter none. If you enter a password there, you will have to enter it everytime you try to use the “passwordless” login, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Enter a password here. Then when you try to connect to the accounts using SSHMenu, you will asked for the password only once, the very first time. (Thanks to Grant, SSHMenu’s author for the explanation in the comments).

Once your RSA key-pair is generated, you need to add the public key to your server’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. You can do this very easily by typing (on your local computer):
$ssh-copy-id ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@example.com
This will copy your public key for the just-generated RSA keypair to the example.com ssh account, where your username is “username”.
Of course, for this passwordless login to work, the server needs to accept this method of authentication. There’s an old article at the Debian Administration blog that describes the process in a little more detail, and countless others have written about this, so you won’t have trouble finding info.

The doctor said I had tenosynovitis – which is a member of the much talked-about Repetitive Strain Injuries. He advised me against using the laptop on my lap – this keep my hands all hunched up together. He also advised a couple of days of rest. So needless to say, I haven’t typed much over the weekend, though I wanted to write a short guide on implementing a Getting Things Done workflow in Linux. I had set things up for GTD the past week, and the search for tools that work on Linux was frustrating, to say the least. I finally had to narrow it down to an online tool that seems very capable of the task. I have been itching to write the article and yet have resisted.

Monday brought me back to work, and I thought I should look at options to reduce the risk of recurrence of the pain. For two reasons – the pain was real bad, and the doctor said that repeated occurrences of RSI would lead to the much-dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and perhaps permanent numbness of the digits in my hands.

GNOME is very advanced when it comes to providing methods to save your hands.

There is the Typing Break in GNOME’s keyboard preferences dialog (System -> Preferences -> Keyboard). Here’s a snapshot:

It is easy enough to ask you computer to lock up every once in an hour or so for 5 minutes to enforce a break.

But for those of us who are not satisfied with a fly swatter to swat flies, there is workrave, with the little sheep for a mascot.

You can install workrave using:
$sudo apt-get install workrave

Once installed, you can add it to your panel as an applet by right-clicking on a panel and adding the applet:
.

Once on the panel, you get to right click on the panel applet and set preferences:

There’s a whole lot to choose from – you can choose to have micro-breaks of less than minute every 10 minutes, say. You can also enforce a longer break every hour or so. A break of 5 minutes every hour seems normal. You can also choose whether to be able to postpone the break when you get the warning of an impending break or not. A break can be either just a disabled keyboard, or a locked screen too, just so you don’t use your mouse to sneak a peek at you mail, or visitor stats

Workrave also has a neat feature where you can exercise your fingers, wrist, neck and arms during the break – there is an on-screen display of how to do the exercise and a virtual character does it with you. Marcel has written about workrave in detail and even has some more screenshots – including one of the dudette who does the exercises with you.

In addition to the forced typing breaks, I am thinking this would be a good time to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. The initial learning phase where typing gets really slow is what’s holding me back. Maybe that is one thing to filed under “someday/maybe” in my GTD system.

I will save the packages with the biggest collection of fonts for the end here. Since I have included screenshots of most of the fonts, and this article is sorta long, please read on by clicking the “More” link below.

Gentium

This is one of my favorite fonts. Gentium calls itself a “Typeface for the Nations”, and looks beautiful. You can install Gentium by doing a:
$sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium

The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both polytonic and monotonic Greek, including a number of alternate forms. These fonts were originally the product of two years of research and study by the designer at the University of Reading, England, as part of an MA program in Typeface Design.

Fonts from Dustismo

These designer fonts were designed by Dustin Norlander of Dustismo. Here’s some sample of the fonts:

You can install all of Dustin’s fonts using:
$sudo apt-get install ttf-dustin

George Williams’ Fonts

George Williams is a font developer (with his own Wikipedia page, no less!) who provided the fonts Monospace, Caslon, Caliban and Cupola. Check out the samples below:

You can install these fonts using:
$sudo apt-get install ttf-georgewilliams

Some Juicy Fonts

The ttf-sjfonts package provides the two fonts, Delphine and Steve Hand which are also available from sourceforge. These are two handwriting fonts, as seen below:

You can install these two fonts using:
$sudo apt-get install ttf-sjfonts

Sun Java6 Fonts – Lucida

Installing the sun-java6-fonts package installs the Lucida fonts and also installs the java6 binary package – so if you install the font package you get Java6 for free! This seems to be weird, but this post is about fonts. The package install Lucida Sans, Lucida Bright and Lucida Typewriter:

You can install these three fonts using:
$sudo apt-get install sun-java6-fonts
Caution: This will also install sun-java6-bin etc – so you will have a working Sun Java 6 if you choose to install this. This is not a “bad” thing, but it can take some time to download and install.

Larabie Fonts

Ray Larabie has been “making fonts and giving them away since 1996″ on the popular font destination LarabieFonts.com. We have three packages in Ubuntu that provide the Larabie fonts, or at least the ones that are free. These three packages provide the “Deco”, “Straight” and “Uncommon” Larabie fonts. Since there are way too many of these fonts, 300+ ? I lost count after a hundred , I will link you to a pdf file with samples of all the fonts. Click on the preview below to see the Larabie Fonts Catalogue (Size: 2.5 MB):

You can install all of the Larabie fonts using:
$sudo apt-get install ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon
Of course, you could just install one of these packs by removing the names of the other two packages.

Summary

If you want to get all the fonts in one go, use the following command:
$sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium ttf-dustin ttf-georgewilliams ttf-sjfonts sun-java6-fonts ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon

These fonts should together provide enough gunpowder for the novice graphic designer in Ubuntu. If you are wondering how I took the sample screenshots, the answer is gnome-specimen, which provides an easy way to preview the fonts installed on your system. It can be installed using:
$sudo apt-get install gnome-specimen

To see more free fonts that are available for Linux systems, visit the Free Font Resources for Open Source OSes Page – it seems to be current since I can already find the Red Hat Liberation Font listed there.

If I missed any TrueType font packages in Ubuntu here, please let me know in the comments.

Update: If you add Seveas’ feisty-extras repository, you can get your hands on the ttf-fossfonts package.

ttf-fossfonts is a collection of 108 GPL/Public-Domain licenced .ttf fonts. Included are the Tuffy family with extended members, and the Open Bar Codes project fonts. The package suggests several other worthwhile font packages.

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird, and love the threaded view, but hate losing the threaded view whenever you click on “Sender” or “Date” to sort the messages, then this is the tip for you. This helps you keep the threaded view regardless of how you sort the messages.

Go to Tools–>Options–>Advanced–>General, and select the Config Editor option.

In the Config Editor, search for “mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads” by typing it in at the top. When you see the preference, change the value from “True” to “False” by double-clicking on it, or by right clicking and changing the value. This will help you keep the threaded view stuck across the different sorting methods.

I find the threaded view useful when browsing the list of bug-related emails, for one. Of course, I use the Claws GTK email client much more than I do Thunderbird, but I have Thunderbird setup on an infrequently used office computer, and I thought many of you might be using Thunderbird anyways.

Anyone who has worked with regular expressions for searching and optionally replacing stuff in files knows what a godsend then can be if you get the regex down pat – but they would also know what a time sink they can be if you can’t whip up exactly what you want. In the past, when faced with this kind of a situation, I would read man pages, books, experiment, fail and then, finally, succeed after a good half hour or so. txt2regex is a tool that eliminates the confusion. Totally.

You can install txt2regex on Ubuntu by doing a:
$sudo apt-get install txt2regex

Among its features include the ability to print a list of characteristics of the regular expression syntax for various tools, a history tool which keeps track of you past regexes, and some pre-built regexes that are often used – for dates, times and numbers.

For example,
$txt2regex --all --make number3
will create the regex for all supported tools. The regex will match a number of the form “34,412,069.90″

Here’s the output:

carthik@milan:~$ txt2regex --all --make number3

### number LEVEL 3: level 2 plus optional commas, like: 34,412,069.90

 RegEx awk       : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)?
 RegEx ed        : [+-]\?[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\?
 RegEx egrep     : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx emacs     : [+-]?[0-9]!!\(,[0-9]!!\)*\(\.[0-9]!!\)?
 RegEx expect    : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)?
 RegEx find      : [+-]?[0-9]!!\(,[0-9]!!\)*\(\.[0-9]!!\)?
 RegEx gawk      : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx grep      : [+-]\?[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\?
 RegEx javascript: [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx lex       : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx lisp      : [+-]?[0-9]!!\\(,[0-9]!!\\)*\\(\\.[0-9]!!\\)?
 RegEx mawk      : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)?
 RegEx mysql     : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx ooo       : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx perl      : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx php       : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx postgres  : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx procmail  : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)?
 RegEx python    : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx sed       : [+-]\?[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\?
 RegEx tcl       : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)?
 RegEx vbscript  : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})?
 RegEx vi        : [+-]\{0,1\}[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\{0,1\}
 RegEx vim       : [+-]\=[0-9]\{1,3}\(,[0-9]\{3}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2}\)\=

$txt2regex --help
prints out a short help message

and

man txt2regex
gives some more info.

What would be handy is if txt2regex had an extension that allowed one to deconstruct a regex – give it a regex and it tells you what it does in plain English. Also, I cannot seem to create regexes for the mod_rewrite module in apache. I suspect that since mod_rewrite supports POSIX regexes, I could just run with one or the other of the regexes created by txt2regex. Since I haven’t tried it, I can’t say which one of the 23, just yet.

Recently I found a way to convert a pdf file to other formats, including .doc and .odt which preserves the formatting of the text pretty well. It is not perfect preserved but it is way better than having no formatting at all.

The secret goes by the name KWord. KWord is a KDE application that has a pdf “import” feature which lets you import either entire pdf documents or just a few pages from a pdf document while preserving the formatting! Of course – this only works for pdf documents which are not scanned images of pages. I tried it out on files created using , MS Word and OpenOffice. The font sizes in the imported document are larger than they need to be, but at least the headings are heading, the normal text is normal text, and the bullets are bullets!

Start the import using the “File” -> “Import” option in the main KWord menu.

After you select the pdf file to be imported, you will see a window like the one above where you can specify the pages you want to import. I did not change the default selected options – changing them and seeing what happens is an exercise left to the reader.

Of course, if you want to install KWord on your Ubuntu system, you can run the following command from the terminal window:
$sudo apt-get install kword

Then you can launch KWord using:
$KWord &
or by clicking the entry for KWord in the menu on your desktop.

Though this is not exactly news (the earliest “official” announcement I can find is from December 04, 2006), I just came across the news today.

I have been a sylpheed-claws Claws Mail user ever since I tried it for the first time. There is no email client that fit my needs the way Claws did. Claws’ beauty lies in its speed — of start up, synchornizing and in general, of all operations. The sensibility of the software surprised me, since it provided those features that I wanted most and felt the lack of earlier. You can “harvest” email addresses from a folder full of emails, and so many other small things that I forget. Never, ever has it crashed on me, which is more than I can say of other clients.

In fact, many times over the last few months, I have thought of writing down what exactly makes Claws superior, in my opinion. I held back since it could be some work to make notes, now that I am used to Claws. I still use Thunderbird on a Windows XP machine occasionally. It has been ages since I used Evolution, which I found heavy, slow and sometimes unresponsive. If you guys are interested, I can start keeping notes and publish an article introducing claws(though it really needs no introduction. )

You can read Lucas’ posts describing the resurrection – post 1, post 2.

The most recent package covered in Deb-a-day is Qalculate. Seems like a very interesting little app. I wonder why someone doesn’t build in all of its functionality in the deskbar applet. That ould be way too cool!

I look forward to deb-a-day posts, and thought that most of you might want to add it to your feedreaders/bookmarks too. Oh, and yes, you can contribute to deb-a-day, too.

How to sync your google calendar with Evolution
The access is “read-only” which means you cannot add events in Evolution and have them show up in your google calendar, but your events in google calendar will be available in Evolution for you to read.

To circumvent the problem of the sync described above not being a “true” two-way sync, one can use scheduleworld as a go-between. This way, Evolution and Google Calendar both sync to scheduleworld, and everything is hunky-dory.

A guide to sync Google calendar using scheduleworld is available, but the guide (unfortunately) deals with MS Outlook primarily.

Many of the concepts from the guide can be usd with Evolution. The missing link is the SyncEvolution plugin for Evolution. There is a thread at Ubuntu Forums that explains how to get going with SyncEvolution. So put it all together, and you can sync your Evolution Calendar with your Google Calendar.

Maybe we should all try and add a few million more users to Ubuntu, and then perhaps Google and everyone else will make it easier for us folks to sync and inter-operate seamlessly with their services. Googlers use Ubuntu – I wonder why a few of them won’t spend their quota of free/creative weekly hours to make things easier for us folks

I use Klipper from KDE to manage my clipboard. Its always on my panel. Though I don’t mind using KDE tools, I’d love a GNOME (GTK) tool that does the same. Looks like my wish will soon be fulfilled!

Glipper is clipboard manager for GNOME that will ship in Feisty! It looks pretty much like Klipper, down to the icon and the name, and I hope it does its job well.

Maybe I’ve said this here before but did you know that there is another way to copy and paste in X? You can highlight some text, and then go to another window or application, click where you want to paste the highlighted text, and then middle-click. If your mouse has no middle button, then you can click both the left and right buttons together to create the middle-click. Thats it – your highlighted text is now pasted in the other application. This simple trick evaded me for a long long time, ’cause no one ever pointed it out to me.